


remember the ashes before they burn

by mapped



Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series)
Genre: Campaign 05: A Crown of Candy, Clairvoyance, D20 Treat, F/F, First Kiss, Introspection, Pre-Canon, Precognition, Timey-Wimey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-04
Updated: 2020-08-04
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:09:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25711144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mapped/pseuds/mapped
Summary: When Lazuli is still young and knowledge is still something she’s eager to dig for with both hands, the future starts to appear to her in caresses and whispers. It brushes her cheek when she casts a spell, holds her arm when she’s walking down a long, deserted corridor, strokes her shoulder when she’s reading by the light of a candle burned nearly to the end.Even with her eyes closed she can see it, hear its voice in her ear, all its promises and all its threats. All the choices it is asking her to make.Lazuli tries not to fall in love. (She doesn't try hard enough.)
Relationships: Caramelinda Rocks/Lazuli Rocks
Comments: 13
Kudos: 35
Collections: Dimension 20 Fic Exchange 2020





	remember the ashes before they burn

**Author's Note:**

  * For [londer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/londer/gifts).



> Prompt:
>
>> Would like: something tender that will probably hurt my feelings. i'm not at all concerned with canon (esp since it's going to be wrapping up airing as you're writing). prompt suggestions: au where laz survives and ruby&jet are their kids (and liam is their sweet ward who laz is teaching magic??), modern au where their families run restaurants (rival? sweet shops????!!), canon universe of them falling in love as teenagers and having to pretend real hard that they don't want this arranged marriage Oh No Mother Please Don't Make Me Marry The Hot Princess Oh No
> 
> I was in a Caramelinda/Lazuli mood so I hope you enjoy this treat, though it doesn't quite fit your suggestions! It's as tender as I could make it, but also quite sad.
> 
> Title from 'Smell' by Sleeping At Last.

When Lazuli is still young and knowledge is still something she’s eager to dig for with both hands, the future starts to appear to her in caresses and whispers. It brushes her cheek when she casts a spell, holds her arm when she’s walking down a long, deserted corridor, strokes her shoulder when she’s reading by the light of a candle burned nearly to the end.

Even with her eyes closed she can see it, hear its voice in her ear, all its promises and all its threats. All the choices it is asking her to make.

She tells herself one thing: _I will never fall in love._

It does not make the path with the brightest days and the darkest nights disappear. The path still winds ahead of her, the clearest of all the paths, an image only in her mind but as solidly paved as the Sucrosi Road, lined on both sides by tall cotton-candy trees, shivering pink in the wind.

She has not yet met Caramelinda, but she already has. She has seen that face a thousand thousand times, the sharp cheekbones and the golden hair. She has gone to sleep beside it a hundred nights, woken up beside it a hundred mornings, and still.

She has not yet met Caramelinda.

* * *

She practises restraint like it’s a spell she can learn. The first time she sees a girl who makes her feel flustered and clumsy—a visiting Fructeran princess, a cherry-faced vision with a silky accent and an even silkier low-cut gown—she breathes and swallows and retreats into the part of her that doesn’t know the present from the future. It proves to be a good enough distraction that by the time she comes out of it, the foreign princess is long gone.

She reads about great mages in the past who drowned in infinite possibilites, their compassion and kindness sanded away into fine dust by the raw edges of their own power. Mages who saw all that would come to pass, the wonders they would never live to witness and the horrors they could never prevent despite their best efforts, and gradually lost their ability to care at all.

The books make this kind of fate seem like a warning, but to Lazuli, sixteen and prone to despair, it glitters more like a goal. What a relief it would be, she thinks, to stop caring. She hopes, by the time she meets Caramelinda, she will not know how to fall in love anymore.

* * *

When she meets Caramelinda at last, she does not fall in love. (Never mind that she has already loved Caramelinda forever, for a span of time stretching far beyond her twenty-four years of existence.) She looks at the Caramelinda before her, freshly twenty and her face softer than Lazuli remembers, and she does not fall in love.

She thinks she has succeeded, that not falling in love now means never falling in love. But the Caramelinda in her mind—several years older and much less timid—is still there, strolling at her side in starlit gardens, debating obscure arcane problems with her, kissing her.

The real Caramelinda follows her around the castle, wide-eyed at the libraries she’s amassed. “I do like to read,” Caramelinda says, one fingertip tracing lovingly over a title on a spine (over Lazuli’s own spine, years later, all the way down to the small of Lazuli’s back), “but we only have a humble collection of books at home.”

Lazuli thinks, _If I am cruel to her perhaps she will not fall in love with me either._ But what she says is, “Please. Borrow anything you like. Knowledge ought to be freely shared.”

Caramelinda takes a book. Then, her eyes flickering shyly over to Lazuli, she takes another one. They wander through the shelves and Caramelinda asks many questions and Lazuli answers all of them.

Caramelinda takes a stack of books, in the end. Lazuli lets her.

* * *

They are two strangers betrothed to each other, and Lazuli thinks: _Unfair that I already know everything about her when she knows nothing about me._ She thinks: _If I keep my distance, all of it will hurt less._ After all, nobody is expecting them to fall in love, and it is not impossible for two people standing on two sides of a chasm to be wedded to each other. She can do this; she has spent most of her youth preparing for it. Silencing her heart and making magic beat in its stead.

What she isn’t prepared for is the smell of Caramelinda’s skin, when Caramelinda leans over her shoulder to look at the runes she’s been inscribing. A deep startled lungful of it, toffee-sweet and warm the way Lazuli never knew a smell could be warm; like a Highbright evening, when the last rays of the sun leave the sky but the air still holds its heat and rings with the noises of the Dulcington summer fête. Like Lazuli’s last memories of a carefree childhood.

Nothing in Lazuli’s visions of the future has ever had a scent.

“What’s this?” Caramelinda asks.

It takes Lazuli a second to reply. She hasn’t recovered from the shock of Caramelinda’s closeness. “It’s—a new spell.”

“Will you show me?”

Lazuli has mastered the art of saying no to herself, but it turns out she isn’t any good at saying no to her betrothed. And when Caramelinda’s eyes glow in the indigo flash of her magic, Lazuli forgets, for a breathless moment, why she ever wanted to say no.

* * *

Sometimes when she looks at Amethar she sees him in Caramelinda’s arms, in a future she wants to—but knows she mustn’t try to—avoid. In these visions, Amethar and Caramelinda’s eyes are always shadowed, their faces empty like the faces of statues. She wonders if there is a way to make this necessary future a happier one. 

She sits down with Amethar on a bench outside one of the many rooms she’s taken over in the castle with her experiments. “What do you think of the Duchess of Meringue?” she asks him.

“She’s—um—she’s really pretty and she seems cool,” Amethar stammers. “Mom said that she’s probably nervous around us because we’re the royal family and she’s only a noblewoman, but, I don’t know, she seems pretty confident to me. If anything I’m kind of. Scared of her? She’s just like, wow. You know.”

“She’s beautiful,” Lazuli prompts. “And you haven’t been around many women even remotely close to your age who aren’t your sisters or servants of the family.” 

Amethar blushes. “Right. But I just mean, she always seems like she knows what she’s doing. Like all of you, and unlike me. I don’t have a clue, half the time.”

“Could you imagine yourself having romantic feelings for her?”

Amethar rears back in horror. “What? No! Laz! Wha— You’re the one who’s marrying her.”

“I don’t believe that was taken into consideration when our parents chose this match for me.”

“You mean you don’t like her like that?” Amethar frowns. “I know you two didn’t know each other before, but you’ve been spending a lot of time together. I would’ve thought maybe you would feel differently by now.” He props his chin up with one fist in thought. “That sounds sad, if you don’t have feelings for her. When _I_ get married, I wanna marry for love.”

“You will,” Lazuli says, offhand, a casual reassurance that won’t be taken as prophetic but in fact is. “But, Amethar, humour me. Imagine you _were_ marrying Caramelinda. Do you think you could fall in love with her?”

“I guess I’m too intimidated by her to really think about it.”

“Well.” Lazuli reaches for the reasons why someone would fall in love with Caramelinda, besides her beauty. She wants to plant the seed in Amethar’s mind, the potential for him to one day give Caramelinda all the love she deserves, when Lazuli is gone. She does not have to reach far. “She is extremely intelligent and a swift learner. She has a fountain of patience, and her political intuition is brilliant—equal to Sapphria’s, I would think. She carries herself with the kind of grace that appears so effortless it can only be the result of a great deal of study. Her curiosity is a marvel. I only wish everyone could be as curious and open to the unfamiliar as her.”

She could go on, but she stops, feeling the weight of Amethar’s gaze on her. “What?” she says.

Amethar shakes his head. “Are you _sure_ you don’t have feelings for her?”

Lazuli narrows her eyes. She pushes up the bridge of her glasses. Too late, she sees that Amethar is right. Somewhere in their long betrothal, in the three years between their first meeting and right now—huddling over books together, teaching Caramelinda spells that sparkle with the newness of having only just been invented, writing letters to each other when they’re apart because Sending, while useful, doesn’t allow Lazuli enough words for all the things she wants to say—the real Caramelinda has caught up to the Caramelinda who lives in Lazuli’s mind. The Caramelinda that she has always thought of as her future is now her present.

And she has been in love with this Caramelinda for lifetimes braided into lifetimes. If she had once glimpsed dim futures where she did not fall in love with Caramelinda, those have long vanished. All that remains is illuminated, swathed in the light of a love that can no longer be denied.

“Hmm,” she says, to Amethar.

To herself, she says: _It is still possible to make sure she doesn’t love me. I can still do that. I can still avert her misery. If I truly love her, it is what I must do._

* * *

Lazuli has been explaining the teleportation network to Caramelinda, who asks to see it in use, and Lazuli still doesn’t know how to say no to her after all this time.

She flicks through all the options in her head, the different places they could travel to. The sights they could see. A more innocuous catalogue of choices than most. “Have you ever been up in the mountains?”

“No, Castle Candy is really the furthest I’ve been away from home. Aren’t the mountains meant to be very cold? Are you taking me there? Do we need to dress more warmly?”

Lazuli ponders this. “No. There’s no need to worry about that. I have a solution, for the cold.” She tries to remember where she left it, but the closer she gets to the terrors of the future that awaits her—war cries and bodies piled high and arrows, so many arrows—the harder it is to recall the past. The minutiae of her life have always easily escaped her, but now they are almost impossible to grasp.

She shuffles papers around on her desk, opens drawers and closes them ( _tents pitched in mud, slippery mud, the sound of Amethar’s laughter as he watches his friends piss in the mud, as though he doesn’t know that all his sisters are going to die, which he doesn’t, and Lazuli can never tell him_ ), until Caramelinda lays a hand on her arm and says, “You know we can both Locate Object, right?”

Lazuli stares at her, weapons clanging in her mind. “Yes. I know that.” She clears her throat and Locates what she is looking for. Apparently she put it in a box along with all her other jewellery. Sensible of her.

“You’ll have to attune to it,” she says, as she takes Caramelinda’s hand and slips the ring onto her finger, where their wedding band will sit, in a few months’ time. “We’ll go in the morning, before sunrise.”

Caramelinda is smiling, looking at the ring on her finger. Lazuli watches as she sits down on a chair and begins to mutter a spell to herself, drawing a hand through the air. Lazuli recognises the ritual instantly. She could, of course, tell Caramelinda what the ring does, but Caramelinda has said before that she likes Identify, because it manifests as Lazuli’s voice in her head.

(“Then why not let the real me explain it to you instead of taking the time to cast the spell, if we both sound the same? Do you prefer the Lazuli in your head to me?”

“She doesn’t lose track of her thoughts as often as you do,” Caramelinda teased her in return. “No, I just— I don’t have as many opportunities to use magic as you, so I like to do it whenever I can. And this was one of the first spells you taught me. When you were showing me that room with all those magical artifacts and then you left me there for a whole afternoon because you got caught up in something else.” She grinned, as Lazuli winced in apology. “It was like you were still there with me, telling me about everything in the room, so it wasn’t so terrible.”)

Identify ritual complete, Caramelinda gives Lazuli an admiring look. “Cold resistance! How wonderful. Do you only have one of these?”

“I’m sure there are more lying around somewhere in the castle.”

There are. In the small hours of the morning, they emerge from the Monastery of the Spinning Star into the dark, wearing matching rings. Out here in the mountains the darkness is ethereal—snow-covered crags reflect the moonlight. Caramelinda stands in a flurry of snowflakes, mouth agape. “We’re really in the mountains,” she says. “It only took us a moment to cover all that distance with teleportation. This is… incredible.”

Lazuli says nothing, only watches Caramelinda absorb the landscape around her.

“And—the ring.” Caramelinda glances at her hand. “I can feel its magic now, wrapping around me. It’s like…” She laughs, beautifully, beautifully, and doesn’t finish her sentence. She reaches for Lazuli’s hand.

Lazuli twines their fingers together. She leads Caramelinda up along a path that the monks of her order have carefully maintained, according to her instructions. When they pass above the source of the Cola River—a rich deep-brown pool, wildly fizzing, vanilla and cinnamon and a smart citrus tang in the air—Lazuli points it out to Caramelinda. “This is where I get the base of the cola concoction for Amethar’s rages from. It’s stronger at the source.”

“The Cola River starts here?” Caramelinda takes a deep breath, and giggles, pressing a hand over her face. “Oh, that’s strong. Even breathing it in tickles my nose.”

Lazuli thinks of love like an arrow, piercing.

As they keep walking, the sky above them lightens. They get to the peak just in time for sunrise. She tugs Caramelinda down to sit with her on a rock as the bright yolk of the sun climbs up into the sky, revealing the wheat fields of Ceresia far below them, just a pale wash of indifferent grey at first that then burns into brilliant gold when touched by light.

Lazuli has seen it before, alone, wishing Caramelinda had been with her. This time it’s not the sun she watches, but how the growing light sculpts Caramelinda’s face into radiance.

Joy brims from Caramelinda like fizz from a shaken bottle of cola, and she turns and meets Lazuli’s eyes. “I love you,” she says, quiet, almost as shy as the day they first met. “I know our marriage is only a political one, and the fact that we’ve become such close friends is already more than I could have hoped for, but... I adore you.”

Lazuli’s heart is beating loud as thunder, her own heart, sugar-flesh and sugar-blood and not just a lump of cold magic, and she realises she never even _tried_ to make Caramelinda not love her. How could she? How could she, when this love runs through her life like the Cola River flowing all the way down from the Great Stone Candy Mountains out to sea, vital and implacable? She has bathed herself in it ever since she was a child and the future cracked open and poured over her. She doesn’t know how to be without it.

She doesn’t know how.

When she kisses Caramelinda, it is for the first time and it is also beyond counting. When she kisses Caramelinda, a part of her is also in the future, kissing Caramelinda for the last time. When she kisses Caramelinda, she is sprinting down the long corridors of her mind, desperately, desperately trying to find the one room where she and Caramelinda will both get to live past the war and grow old together, have children together, see Candia thriving and vibrant with magic together.

She doesn’t find it. There is no future in which both she and Candia survive.

Caramelinda sighs, her thumb playing across the back of Lazuli’s neck, one arm around Lazuli’s waist. “That’s what the magic from the Ring of Warmth feels like,” she says. “I mean. I didn’t know what kissing you would be like, but I’d imagined—” Her cheeks flush. “I’d hoped it would be like this.”

“When I created these rings,” Lazuli says, running her fingers through Caramelinda’s hair, lifting soft strands of it to inhale the sweet toffee scent, “I only wanted to make something that would keep me as warm as thoughts of you do.” The smell of Caramelinda’s hair is almost warm enough to melt away all their unforgiving futures. It is proof that Lazuli is alive, here and now, though her heart feels pierced through with arrows. “My darling, I’ve always loved you.”

And it’s true. She always has, always.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! :) Comments are extremely appreciated. You can find me [@reluming](http://reluming.tumblr.com) on tumblr!


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